Workshop of Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano

Workshop of is the attribution label for a picture made in a master's studio, from his design and under his name, mostly by assistants. In Venice around 1500 that was ordinary practice. A popular image of the Virgin and Child could be painted again and again for buyers who each wanted one.

The Louvre's Madonna and Child is one of these repeats. The same composition survives in several versions, and the museum considers the finest to be those in the National Gallery in London and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. It judges its own panel fairly weak, even though Cima's name is painted on the parapet in front of the Virgin. Infrared examination has found a landscape with buildings under the curtain behind her, which suggests the design was changed along the way.

The Louvre dates the panel to around 1513. Three numerals added to the parapet later may explain an old record of the date 1524, several years after Cima's death. It came to the museum in 1914 with the bequest of Baron Basile de Schlichting, a collector who left his collection to the Louvre.